Simon Smith – Curator/ Curatorial & Accessioning

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

The National Film and Sound Archive’s (NFSA) major digital exhibition Radio 100 launches a new chapter with Youthquake, which charts the rise of radio as a vital force in the emergence of youth culture in Australia.  

Youthquake highlights the transistor as the first go-anywhere form of media, enabling teenagers of the 1960s to leave the family wireless in the living room and become the first generation to personalise their listening experience. It was, says NFSA curator Simon Smith, ‘a pocket-sized rebellion against the conformity of gathering around a single device’.